Which Countries Have More Open Governments? Assessing Structural Determinants of Openness Item Type Article Authors Schnell, Sabina; Jo, Suyeon Citation Schnell, S., & Jo, S. (2019). Which Countries Have More Open Governments? Assessing Structural Determinants of Openness. The American Review of Public Administration, 49(8), 944–956. https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074019854445 DOI 10.1177/0275074019854445 Publisher SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC Journal AMERICAN REVIEW OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Rights © The Author(s) 2019. Download date 25/09/2021 10:44:47 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Version Final accepted manuscript Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/634561 WHICH COUNTRIES HAVE MORE OPEN GOVERNMENTS? 1 Which Countries Have More Open Governments? Assessing Structural Determinants of Openness Abstract An increasing number of countries are adopting open government reforms, driven, in part, by the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a global effort dedicated to advancing such initiatives. Yet, there is still wide variation in openness across countries. We investigate the political, administrative, and civic factors that explain this variation, using countries’ fulfillment of OGP eligibility criteria as a proxy for minimum standards of openness. We find that countries with strong constraints on the executive and high levels of citizen education have governments that are more open. A dense network of civil society organizations is associated with more budget transparency and higher civil liberties, but not with access to information or asset disclosure laws. The results suggest that if the value of openness is to be translated in practice, it is not enough to have capable bureaucracies – countries also need informed citizens and strong oversight of executive agencies. Keywords: open government, transparency, access to information, global initiatives WHICH COUNTRIES HAVE MORE OPEN GOVERNMENTS? 2 Which Countries Have More Open Governments? Assessing Structural Determinants of Openness On his first day in office in 2009, President Obama issued the Open Government Directive, which encouraged public agencies to be more transparent, participatory and collaborative (McDermott, 2010). In 2011, he launched the Open Government Partnership (OGP) at the U.N. General Assembly, together with six other heads of state. The OGP is a global multi-stakeholder partnership that aims to “secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance” (Center for American Progress, 2016, p. 2). Today, 70 governments are active OGP members, and they are joined by myriad non-governmental and international organizations that want to advance government openness around the world. Even outside of the OGP initiative, more and more national and local governments are adopting various open government measures, from open data portals to using online tools to consult and involve citizens and policy-makers (Wirtz and Birkmeyer, 2015). As it increased in popularity, open government (OG) has been touted not just as a way of improving government performance and citizen participation, but also as a new form of or paradigm for governance (OECD, 2016). While scholars have identified some determinants of overall institutional quality in a country (e.g, Islam & Montenegro, 2002; Serra 1613/2011), relatively little is known about the contexts in which open government specifically is likely to flourish. Public administration research on open government has examined its conceptual dimensions (Meijer, Curtin, & Hillebrandt, 2012), the organizational drivers of open government at the local level in the US (Grimmelikhuijsen & Feeney, 2016), and US open government policy (McDermott, 2010; Piotrowski, 2017, 2018). However, few have asked why some national WHICH COUNTRIES HAVE MORE OPEN GOVERNMENTS? 3 governments are more open than others. Understanding which country-level, macro-structural factors and “large forces” shape government openness is, however, critical to the pursuit of OG efforts (Roberts, 2015). It can help advocates, practitioners, and researchers understand the contexts in which OG reforms are more likely to take hold and be successful, as well as how to improve the overall preconditions for government openness in a country. Hence, the overall research question for this paper is which political, administrative, and civic factors are associated with more open governments around the world. Part of the challenge in assessing cross-national correlates of open government is the lack of an established measure of openness that is comparable across countries. To date, public administration research about the drivers of OG primarily has focused on measures of website openness (e.g., Grimmelikhuijsen & Feeney, 2016; Welch & Wong, 2001; Wong & Welch, 2004), or budget transparency (Wehner & de Renzio, 2013; Alt & Lassen, 2006; Rios, Bastida, & Benito, 2014; Bolívar, Perez & Hernandez, 2006; Bolívar et al., 2013), and predominantly at the local or subnational government level (Grimmelikhuijsen & Feeney, 2016; Grimmelikhuijsen and Welch, 2012; Ortiz-Rodriguez et al., 2015). The OGP offers a new option for such a cross-national measure of openness in the form of the eligibility criteria that countries have to meet to join the partnership. We leveraged these eligibility scores to build a dataset spanning five years and 121 countries. The next section introduces the OGP and approaches to measuring open government, and explains how the OGP eligibility criteria serve as a measure for a minimum standard of openness. We then review extant theoretical and empirical literature on macro-level determinants of government openness and transparency, and develop a set of hypotheses about the political, administrative, and civic factors that are most strongly associated with government openness. We find that two structural factors are the strongest predictors of openness across all measures used: WHICH COUNTRIES HAVE MORE OPEN GOVERNMENTS? 4 executive constraints and citizen education. A dense network of civil society organizations is associated with de facto (in-practice) measures of openness, but not with de jure measures. Other factors often assumed as important for different aspects of openness, such as political competition and administrative traditions and capacity are not significant related to any of the measures of openness used in our dataset. We conclude with recommendations for further cross- national research on the structural drivers of government openness, as well suggestions on how the OGP could further strengthen the global openness agenda. The OGP and Government Openness In 2011, the governments of Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the Open Government Declaration and started the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The goal of the OGP is to encourage and help governments around the world adopt and implement open government initiatives by offering a global knowledge and cooperation platform for openness activists. Governments that want to join must endorse the Open Government Declaration, meet the eligibility criteria discussed below, and formally apply to the Steering Committeei to become members (OGP, 2018a). Once they join, they have to prepare an Open Government Action Plan every two years through a consultative process that involves civil society and openness activists. The Action Plans include time-bound measures (commitments) to increase openness, which can range from the online publishing of various kinds of data in an open format to setting up consultation mechanisms to include indigenous (and other) groups in policy making (OGP, 2016). OGP aims to be a global knowledge platform that supports and encourages governments to become more open (Fox, 2013). Yet, it also acknowledges the dangers of “open-washing,” that is, governments joining the OGP as a way to increase their international status by paying lip- WHICH COUNTRIES HAVE MORE OPEN GOVERNMENTS? 5 service to openness, while engaging in less-than-open, sometimes outright repressive behavior. To avoid or limit “open-washing,” the OGP has built in a series of “safe-guards” both in terms of who can join and how member countries behave once they have joined. To ensure participation in the preparation of the action plans, the OGP has developed a set of guidelines for civil society consultation. The quality and the implementation of the action plans and the degree of civil society participation is monitored by independent experts from participating countries, who produce progress reports every two years. The reports are validated and centralized by the OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanisms (IRM), an independent body affiliated with the OGP and overseen by an International Experts Panel (IEP) composed of global transparency, participation, and accountability experts (OGP, 2018b). As another safeguard, the OGP requires governments that want to join to “demonstrate a minimum level of commitment to open government principles” (OGP, 2018a). They do so by meeting a set of four eligibility criteria agreed-upon by the Steering Committee.ii These criteria arguably represent minimum standards of government openness, and reflect the currently dominant interpretation of openness as transparency and participation (Meijer, Curtin and Hillebrandt, 2012).iii The first three OGP eligibility criteria assess the level of government transparency